Ariana Douglas

Toronto French Horn Teacher

Project Description

A.Dip. (Glenn Gould School)B.Mus (U of T)

Ariana is a horn player and teacher from Mississauga, Ontario. She has performed is an active soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral player and has performed with groups such as the Etobicoke Philharmonic Orchestra and in festivals such as the Busan Maru International Music Festival in South Korea.

When she isn’t listening to music, in rehearsal or practicing she is probably cooking or wandering her neighbourhood for cats to befriend.

Best Thing about teaching at ABC: Giving students tools they can use to nurture their voice as musicians and help them hone skills used in musical study that will be beneficial to them no matter where their musical journey takes them.

Latest Homework from Ariana

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Don’t get discouraged! trying and failing is an essential part of learning. You have great musical ability and have improved significantly overall in the last couple of months. Keep working at it!

Use good posture! remember to sit at the edge of your chair with your feet flat on the ground. Try to take in deep breaths, through your mouth.

As part of your warmup/ practice routine play a C major arpeggio (middle C, first line E, second line G). keep the air moving forward through the notes, picture the driving through the rainbow item cubes in Mario Kart. Continue using long tones in your warmup.

Work on your music from school, pay special attention to the quality of repeated articulation in “Common Denominator”

Here is the opening horn line from Schubert Nine, first in C (so you can sing it or play in on a piano to get in in your ear) then in F to play on the horn (the one starting on written G). Listen to a recording then start looking at this! Bellow this is a fingering chart.

Preferred Books for Ariana’s Students

Click to buy them here, and they’ll come right to your house! What could be easier?

Solos for the French Horn Player

Sixty Selected Studies

Georg Kopprasch was born sometime before 1800, pursued a career as a horn player at least until 1832, and composed two sets of horn etudes which includes this set of 60 etudes, Op. 6. Most of the etudes focus on technical problems relating to the high range of the Horn. 46 pages.

200 New Melodic and Gradual Etudes

The Art of French Horn Playing

First to be published in the series was The Art of French Horn Playing by Philip Farkas, now Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Music at Indiana University. In 1956, when Summy-Birchard published Farkas’s book, he was a solo horn player for the Chicago Symphony and had held similar positions with other orchestras, including the Boston Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, and Kansas City Conservatory, DePaul University, Northwestern University, and Roosevelt University in Chicago. The Art of French Horn Playing set the pattern, and other books in the series soon followed, offering help to students in learning to master their instruments and achieve their goals.